Vendler begins The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar with an account of her life as a critic, from childhood enthusiasm to sharpened focus and an urge to write, and from early-career impediments to the “free rein, unlimited space, and genial encouragement” of William Shawn’s New Yorker.

With the Gazette Vendler touched on such topics as her early dissatisfaction with the teaching of poetry:

In my student days, it was common to assume that the poem makes a statement — that it’s protesting war, or is grieving a death. My teachers, on the whole, didn’t see a poem as an evolving thing that might be saying something completely new at the end because it had changed its mind from whatever it had proposed at the beginning. I was sure you couldn’t sum it up propositionally: You couldn’t say, as it was common to say, “What is the meaning of this poem?”

Her fascination with the development of individual poets:

My mother had brought back from the bookmobile a biography of Hopkins which quoted many of his poems. I began to read Hopkins with great elation and memorized much of what I read. I wrote what was supposed to be a 17-page high school senior paper, only it turned into a 40-page essay. [Laughter.] I think it was my first book. And it gave me my first taste of critical competence: by then I knew everything Hopkins had written — the letters, the sermons, the devotional writings, the biography. It’s not a big corpus.

It was exhilarating to write at length from knowledge of a single poet’s complete works, since anthologies offer only little snippets. I very soon grasped how rewarding it was to write on a single poet. I’ve never written on themes except as elements in the changing explorations of a poet, the evolution of the author’s poetics from the early juvenilia all the way up to the end.

And sustained need to consider the work of each alone:

I can understand poets only one by one: They are too idiosyncratic to be lumped together.

Each book had a polemical purpose: to declare that Yeats’ “system” had powerful poetic implications; to argue that Stevens’ long poems were not “ponderous and elephantine”; to contest the belief that Herbert could be appreciated adequately only by a faithful son of the church; to show that Keats’ odes had been insufficiently well read, and were in fact interconnected as a series; to assert that Shakespeare’s sonnets, all 154 of them, not merely the famous ones, deserved individual commentaries; to offer an alternative to the Irish political criticism that had neglected Heaney as a poet; and to suggest that Dickinson’s harsher and more difficult poems could, and should, be read by a wider public.

It’s a hallmark much evidenced in The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar, which includes readings of longtime Vendler subjects Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham, along with consideration of Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, Mark Ford, and more.

20 February 2015

If we could channel a time before “how to code” seemed deemed the only thing worth learning, an enhanced appreciation for poetry would probably feature highly on surveys of edificatory aspiration. Such a goal may also be among those most rarely pursued, though, given the barriers—real or imagined—that surround that most refined of literary forms.

Enter the MOOC. Maligned as they are, MOOCs can actually be just the thing for someone looking for a bit of guidance on a first foray into an area they may never have visited on their own. And so Harvard’s edX Poetry in America series has hopefully been received as a welcome entry point for the masses to whom it’s open.

This course, the fourth installment of the multi-part Poetry in America series, explores the poetry of Emily Dickinson, one of America’s most distinctive and prolific poets. While Dickinson wrote nearly 2,000 poems during her lifetime, she chose never to publish, opting instead to revisit and revise her works throughout her lifetime. Keeping this dynamic of self-revision in mind, we will consider a number of Dickinson’s poems—many seemingly in tension with one another—concerned with Nature, Art, the Self, and Darkness. We will travel to the Dickinson Collection at Harvard's Houghton Library, and to Amherst, Massachusetts, paying a visit to the house in which the poet lived and wrote until her death in 1886. Distinguished guests for this module include NBA athlete Jason Collins, dancers Damian Woetzel and Charles “Lil Buck” Riley, and President and CEO of the New America Foundation Anne Marie Slaughter, among others.

Led by Harvard Professor Elisa New, Poetry in America surveys nearly 400 years of American poetry. Through video lectures, archival images and texts, expeditions to historic sites, interpretive seminars with large and small groups, interviews with poets and scholars, and conversations about poems with distinguished Americans, Poetry in America embarks on a journey through the literature of a nation. Distinguished guests, including President Bill Clinton, Elena Kagan, Henry Louis Gates, Eve Ensler, John McCain, Andrea Mitchell, Michael Pollan, Drew Faust, Tony Kushner, and Nas, among others, bring fresh perspectives to the study of American Poetry.

Previous units of the course took as their subjects the poetry of early New England, “Nature and Nation,” and Walt Whitman. With the launch in 2013 of the open access Emily Dickinson Archive, though, this new installment should prove itself an unusually fruitful bit of internet matchmaking. And, as Houghton Library curator and Emily Dickinson Archive General Editor Leslie Morris explains in the video below, that’s exactly what we all hoped for as the Archive took shape.

04 June 2014

The jailed dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, one of the many thousands of Chinese whose lives were forever changed by their presence in Tiananmen Square twenty-five years ago today, has spent the years since then fighting for a more open and democratic China. That fight has been conducted in writing, through poems and essays that earned Liu the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.

It was on the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, while serving in the Dalian labor camp, that Liu wrote the poem below, “Standing Amid the Execrations of Time.” The poem, translated here by Isaac P. Hsieh, is excerpted from No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems.

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To me, standing amid the execrations of Time that day seems so strange

1

Ten years ago this day dawn, a bloody shirt sun, a torn calendar all eyes upon this single page the world a single outraged stare time tolerates no naïveté the dead rage and howl till the earth’s throat grows hoarse

Gripping the prison bars this moment I must wail in grief for I fear the next so much I have no tears for it remembering them, the innocent dead, I must thrust a dagger calmly into my eyes must purchase with blindness clarity of the brain for that bone-devouring memory is best expressed by refusal

2

Ten years ago this day soldiers stand at attention poses dignified and correct, trained to uphold a hideous lie dawn is a crimson flag fluttering in the half-light people crane and stand on tiptoe curious, awed, earnest a young mother lifts her baby’s hand to salute that sky-eclipsing lie

10 January 2014

Poet, playwright, activist, and intellectual Amiri Baraka died yesterday at 79. A renaissance man who spent over fifty years fusing art and politics, Baraka was also a brilliant critic whose Blues People: Negro Music in White America has proven an enduring study of black music and its meanings. That work was highlighted in Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties, where author Scott Saul recounts Baraka’s heralding of John Coltrane as “the heaviest spirit,” exemplar of a black aesthetic. Baraka wrote of Coltrane that he “showed us how to murder the popular song,” an act Baraka rendered emblematic: “New Black Music is this: Find the self, then kill it.” In the following excerpt from Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t, Saul explores Baraka’s location of a new black consciousness in Coltrane’s music.

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“Find the self, then kill it”: such was Baraka’s prescription for a more vibrant black music and a more vital black community, and he began with himself. His Blues People was an unprecedented work of cultural criticism that told the history of black America through its musical forms, but it was also a personal act of re-making—an attack on the white jazz critics who had given Baraka a platform for his own writing, and a critique of the black middle-class world that he had grown up in, as the child of a postal supervisor and a social worker and as a student at Rutgers and Howard University. The basic thrust of Blues People was to reclaim the blues as a way of looking at the world, not just a music: “each phase of the Negro’s music,” he wrote, “issued directly from the dictates of his social and psychological environment.” Baraka attacked white critics for pretending that all music was equal, that it could be evaluated in isolation from the cultural needs of the community that created it. “The catalysts and necessity of Coltrane’s music must be understood as they exist even before they are expressed as music,” he wrote. The question for the critic was less “What do I think of Coltrane’s scream?” and more “Why does this man—and so many like him—feel compelled to scream in the first place?” The goal of jazz criticism was understanding, not appreciation.

Understanding contemporary black music for Baraka meant locating it as part of a long and complicated struggle, one between the dominant forces of Western modernity and a black countertradition that had often been derided and suppressed. This struggle was grounded in separate worldviews, separate systems of ethics and aesthetics. While the “‘enlightened’ concepts of the Renaissance,” he wrote, “created a schism between what was art and what was life,” black music refused to separate art from living ritual. While American culture was geared to rationalization, compartmentalization, and “economic-mindedness,” black music filtered mystery, tragedy, and joy into a compelling form of consolation and resistance. Baraka used this overarching theoretical framework to understand the cultural work of specific musical genres, from work songs, shouts, and spirituals to the blues and jazz in all its forms. At its most incisive, Blues People told the history of jazz as the history of a hybrid music, the sound of creative social antagonism. One of Blues People’s most powerful passages, for instance, describes how early New Orleans musicians were riven by the contradictory desire both to connect with the black community and to “make it” in white and Creole society, and then links this inner conflict between “freedman” and “citizen” identities to the music’s synthesis of blues timbre and brass-band orchestration.

We are extremely pleased to join a whole host of collaborating institutions in announcing the launch of the Emily Dickinson Archive, an open access website collecting high resolution scans of most of Dickinson’s extant poems.

While Dickinson is one of literature’s most loved, it’s perhaps not widely known among her legions of admirers that she did not publish in her own lifetime. Given her tendency to write multiple variations of poems—and her embrace of esoteric punctuation—generations of Dickinson scholars have debated interpretations and transcriptions of her manuscripts. The site now allows both scholars and casual readers alike to see the originals for themselves, absent the layers of mediation added by their posthumous publication.

At the Emily Dickinson Archive readers may browse Dickinson’s manuscript pages by first line, date, or recipient, or search across the full text of poem transcriptions. Readers can also refer to past editors’ transcriptions and use the site’s tools to create their own transcriptions, annotate images, or zoom in to look closely at Dickinson’s handwriting.

In the video below, EDA General Editor and Houghton Library Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts Leslie Morris introduces the site and some of its features.

16 July 2012

“It’s a London thing,” shouts a man on a bus in the night, aping a well-known estate agent’s slogan in a piece by the young English poet Ahren Warner. The man, who’s perhaps a bit in his cups and has earned a slap from his girlfriend, is “obviously a knob,” we’re told, but a happy one.

Mark Ford, the editor of our massive new anthology, London: A History in Verse, says the shout of Warner’s man stuck in his mind as “a particularly resonant way of trying to define what it is about London poetry that makes it different from other kinds of poetry.”

It’s always got to have a London thing about it. If you’re in London, you know you’re at the center of something, and that affects the way people behave in London, and it affects the way people write about London. For good or ill, they’re at the center of something and there’s lots of other people competing in that center. So, it seemed to me that the London “thing” was what I was after as I was scouring poetry books from the 14th century—1350s, indeed—to the present day.

Ford explains more about the poetry of London, and about how he approached the task of selecting the anthology’s contents, in this short video:

As he lays out in the book’s Preface, Ford intended the collection to mimic the layered feel of the city itself:

The poetry of London reflects all strata of the culture of London, and an anthology such as this might be said to replicate the way so many different types of Londoner, or types of visitor to London, find themselves crammed into the same tube carriage, so to speak—that is, forced to share the contested spaces and resources of the city. The collection is arranged chronologically according to the author’s date of birth, thus allowing, I hope, a sense of the successive waves of the city’s history, as the eras leach into each other, marked, now and again, by some singular crisis or decisive event. The range of poems and authors collected here seems to me a moving and eloquent testimony to the power of London to attract and absorb and inspire and give voice to its residents, and to the power of poetry to create, layer by layer by layer, its own history of the city.

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